


A Mission of Angels

by what_alchemy



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels, Family, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 08:19:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5778271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not the devil Matt's got inside him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mission of Angels

**Author's Note:**

> He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, indignation, and distress -- a mission of angels of woes.
> 
> Psalm 78:49

Break for lunchtime. Indonesian. Foggy happy and smiling, a little curry smudged in the corner of his mouth, his knees knocking gently into Matt’s with each emphasized syllable. Outside their building, a woman. 

_Sensible flats, worn and inexpensive, scuffling to and fro on the patch of concrete just outside the door._

“So then,” Foggy was saying, waving his chopsticks around, “I was like, ‘it’s not my fault if you don’t even know what the guy who wrote your contracts put into that shit, man, what do you mean you didn’t read it over?’” 

He plopped a bunch of curry noodles from his plate onto Matt’s plate without pausing. 

_A purse strap in leather — no, faux-leather — worried between fingers and thumbs, both hands, the lingering oils from Ethiopian lunch rubbed in._

“So he gets rich old white guy ruffled, you know what I’m talking about, all red but _stiff upper lip, Madge, wouldn’t do to appear thus in front of the help, what are emotions_ , and he goes — Matt, are you listening to me?”

_Heartbeat like a jackhammer, nerves taut, lifetime smoker’s lungs laboring under the strain._

“Matty?”

Like the snap of an elastic, Matt’s attention returned to Foggy. His hair, a little longer than chin-length these days, brushed softly at one shoulder. A tilted head.

“Am I boring you, bud?” he asked. “Damn, didn’t know the magic would be gone already.”

“No,” Matt said. He cleared his throat. “No, sorry. There’s someone outside the building debating whether or not to come in. She’s nervous.”

Foggy set his take-out aside and sat back. Matt lost the warmth of his thighs slotted in amongst his own.

“Potential client?”

“I assume so,” Matt said. “But we can’t go out and corral her like a couple of big creeps.”

“Maybe Karen’ll do it like a little non-creep when she gets back from lunch.”

“She really brings our creep factor down,” Matt said. “Maybe we should give her a raise.”

“Hey, bud, I’m not the one lurking around and listening in on heartbeats and such,” Foggy said. “You’re skewing our statistics.”

“That’s hurtful,” Matt said. “You’re hurting me.”

“Aw.” Foggy knocked their knees together and locked one of Matt’s between both of his own. The half-wet sound of a smirk. “Delicate Mr. McStub-horns is delicate.”

“You gotta stop calling me that in public,” Matt said. “People are gonna think weird, kinky, small-penisy things about me.”

“Can’t have that,” Foggy said. His voice went low and husky and the humidity between them rose. Matt had just enough time to set his styrofoam down before leaning in for a curry-flavored kiss. Foggy’s lips were silky and plush in contrast to the way stubble threatened at his chin. He smelled of the usual things: a drink more sugar and cream than coffee, a touch of scrambled egg and breakfast ham, exhaust from walking to work, his drugstore strawberry shampoo with a hint of last weekend’s lingering visit to Josie’s, clean cotton fabric softener, fresh rain and moss with a dark undernote of molasses Matt could never figure out. And today, underneath it all, the base note of Matt himself, neutral and clean. Matt’s ass clenched with the memory and he could taste it, smell it, feel it all over again: Foggy working him open with slick gentle fingers, covering Matt’s body with the comforting, solid mass of his own, forehead hot on Matt’s temple as he pushed inside and Matt arched to meet him, mouth open and gasping. 

Matt pulled back, hands cradling Foggy’s face, breath quick and harsh.

“We’re gonna have to have rules at work,” he said. 

“Can we implement them after I fuck you over my desk?” 

“Oh my God, _please_.”

Foggy’s fingers threaded through the hair at the back of Matt’s neck before he pulled Matt in to claim his mouth. Matt wanted nothing more than to melt under the onslaught, but two blocks away he heard the familiar cadence of Karen’s heels growing louder as she made her way back to the office. 

He pulled away from Foggy and heaved in a lungful of air. 

“Wait,” he said. “They’ll be here in a couple minutes.”

“Curses,” Foggy said. “Cockblocked by normal business hours.”

“Later,” Matt said, voice like gravel. 

“I’m just gonna…” Foggy gingerly levered himself off the chair. There was the rustle of clothing as he rearranged his hard-on to be less conspicuous, and then the scrape of the chair being dragged across the floor so Foggy’s desk was between them. Matt hunched over his own erection and closed his eyes to will it away. Across the desk, Foggy plopped back into his seat and shoveled a bunch of noodles into his mouth as if the carbs could sop up all his arousal. Matt cleared his throat.

“Bets on her case?” he asked.

Foggy pushed his food into one cheek and spoke around the obstacle.

“Freed a bunch of baby raccoons, possums, and skunks slated for euthanasia,” he said. “Charged with trespassing, larceny, and criminal mischief, but she insists she’s a freedom fighter.”

“But she can’t really comprehend that at their age, they’ll fail to thrive without a mother, so really she’s just prolonging their suffering.”

“Oh man,” Foggy laughed. He swallowed his mouthful of noodles and poked his chopsticks in the air. “Lucky for us, PETA’s not concerned about actual animal cruelty and wants to pay all her legal fees.”

“Now she can’t get the smell of skunk off her skin,” Matt said. “It’s really settled in.”

“Oh my God, _really?_ ”

“No,” Matt said, laughing. He shook his head. “But if any of this were true, I’d have smelled her a mile away.”

“I used to envy you, Murdock, but now I really don’t,” Foggy said. “No offense.” He leaned in and stage whispered, “ _Garbage day._ ”

“Wait, what?” Matt said. Foggy’s heart, so steady and strong, skipped a beat. “You envied me?”

“Well, sure,” Foggy said with a little huff of laughter, the flutter of moth wings on Matt’s skin. 

“My God, _why?_ ” A blind orphan with no real friends before he met Foggy. A blind orphan with senses that almost drove him into whatever they called insane asylums these days. A blind orphan with the devil inside him.

“Oh please,” Foggy scoffed. He waved a hand in Matt’s direction. “Like you aren’t hyperaware of the way you’ve managed to merge ‘unbearably adorable’ with ‘screamingly bangable.’ The mouth, the biceps, the ass — you even make straight men and lesbians the world over gag for a piece, and that’s before you go opening your mouth and proving you’re a smarty-pants on top of it all. Christ, Matt, who wouldn’t envy you?”

“I think you might be exaggerating,” Matt said. “And also biased.”

“No, I am 100% objective all the time, it is a fact.”

“Is that so?”

“Uh huh.”

Matt found himself leaning over the desk, mere inches from the temptation of Foggy’s lips once again. Two sets of cardiovascular systems, pumping hard from the climb up stairs, approached the office.

“Quit being so irresistible,” Matt said, pushing his chair back. Foggy’s thunderous heart was a sound and a feeling all at once.

“You started it.” 

They both stood and smoothed out their clothes. Foggy dipped his head and swept his hand toward the door. Matt reached out and flicked his earlobe before exiting his office. He could hear the slick twist of Foggy sticking his tongue out at the back of Matt’s head before following. 

When Karen and the client came through the door, Matt saw light for the first time since he was blinded. It wasn’t bright and it wasn’t all-encompassing, but it glowed, gentle and dim, at the edges of his visual perception. _She_ glowed, rather. In an outline, ever so softly, this stranger made Matt see.

He staggered.

“Whoa, buddy!” Foggy said, propping him up with a big warm hand between the shoulder blades. “You all right there?”

“Sorry, I — I must have forgotten my cane.” 

“I’ll… go get it for you?”

He could _feel_ the bewildered scrunch of Foggy’s face, but it would have to wait. He plastered his own best self-deprecating smile on and held his hand out to the client. The light pulsing off of her made it difficult for him to concentrate on anything else. He had no idea how old she might be, how tall or where she’d come from. He was truly blind, seeing. 

“Forgive me,” he said. “It’s easy to forget I still need it even in familiar spaces. Matt Murdock.” Her hand slid into his — slight, but firm and strangely calloused. “The saint getting my cane is my partner Foggy Nelson, and you’ve already had the pleasure of meeting Karen. How can we help you?”

“You’re Battlin’ Jack’s boy,” she said. “You don’t much look like him. Maybe a little around the jaw.” Her voice was deep and velvet, calling to mind nothing so much as the river of chocolate he saw in a movie when he was a kid. Matt’s heart clattered against his ribs and promptly took up residence in the bottom of his belly. He gasped, and Foggy was there, pressing his cane into his hand and holding him up at the same time.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Karen said, sweeping in to pull the client away. “Maybe you should talk to Mr. Nelson, and I can get Mr. Murdock some medical attention.”

“No, it’s my fault,” said the client. The glow around her seemed to fold in on itself — she was gliding away from him. “I shouldn’t have come here. It was selfish of me. Thank you, Miss Page.”

“Wait,” Matt said, hand outstretched. “You knew my dad.”

She hovered in the doorjamb. Foggy’s hand was a hot anchor on the small of his back, and Karen’s heartbeat came quick and nervy.

“Yes,” the client said. 

“You knew me.”

“Maybe we should speak in private, Mr. Murdock.”

“My office is this way,” Matt said. He sidestepped Foggy’s hand and hoped the touch of his fingertips to Foggy’s wrist was apology enough. 

“Matt…”

“It’s fine, Fog.”

Foggy’s teeth clacked as he clenched his jaw. 

“Holler if you need me,” he said. He and Karen were doing the thing where they made meaningful faces at each other behind other people’s backs, but Matt led the client away. Even through all his curiosity, he wished she were still outside so all this light wouldn’t distract him from what he could be learning about her. 

He sat himself down in his chair while she settled in across from him. They were silent for a while, but through the tendrils of light he detected the sensation of being studied. He tilted his head at her.

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” he said. “You know me, and I don’t know you. I don’t even know your name.”

“I go by Katherine,” she said. 

“You go by.”

“No one could pronounce my true name, Mr. Murdock,” she said. “Even you.”

“Where are you from, Katherine?”

“Out of town.”

Matt sat back and did some tooth grinding of his own. He couldn’t tell if she was smirking at him or if her heartbeat were going haywire. All this damnable _light_.

“Forgive me my bluntness, Katherine, but for someone who came in here pretty strong, you’re awfully silent once we have a little privacy.”

“I’m looking at you,” she said. “Taking it all in. You fascinate me, Mr. Murdock.”

Matt straightened, shoulders squared and ready for battle.

“Is that so?”

“I saw your name in the paper,” she went on. “All that Fisk business. It was very well done of you.”

“Thank you.”

“Matthew Murdock, hometown hero,” she said. “You’ve been in the papers before. You and your childhood courage. You and your father’s hubris. You and your—”

“Maybe we could leave my father out of this, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Katherine said. “He was integral in the proceedings, after all.”

A long time ago, Stick had taught Matt how to set up filters, and the first filter they worked on was one for himself. “If all you can hear is the sound of your own shit coalescing inside you, Matty, that’s what we call a one-way ticket to the nuthouse,” he’d said. Matt’s filters failed him now. Blood rushed deafening in his ears, and his heartbeat slammed through his body like a train.

“He — didn’t talk about my mom much.”

“No,” Katherine said. “He wouldn’t have.”

“But I know her name was Kate.”

“He could have poisoned you against me,” Katherine said. “I wouldn’t have blamed him.”

Matt steadied himself with hands braced on his armrests.

“Why are you here?”

“At his heart, Jack was a kind man,” she said. “Not a particularly bright one, mind you, but kind. It’s why I liked him so much. Foolish of me, I suppose, but human bodies are so prone to foolish things, aren’t they?”

Matt stood. 

“I think you should leave.”

“Tell me, Mr. Murdock,” Katherine said. “Tell me how it felt when you put that lovely red suit on and got Wilson Fisk’s face beneath the rain of your knuckles. Tell me what his blood on your hands did to your heart.” The glow drew nearer. 

“How are you— How do you—”

Matt startled when those rough hands cupped his face. At that hot, electric touch, he recognized the pattern of her callouses from his studies — she wielded a sword. A massive sword, made not for fencing or decoration but for death and war, spent many years in these two tiny, impossible hands. 

“There’s too much of me in you,” she whispered. “I should apologize for that, but if pride was your father’s downfall, so too is it mine. He and I always did match, in our way.”

Tears prickled at Matt’s eyes, stinging hot. 

“Why can I _see_ you?” he hissed.

“Can you?” she said, her light and her warmth leaving him as she receded. “That’s interesting.”

“Please go,” he said. His voice cracked. “Please.”

“Forgive me,” she said. “That’s your favorite phrase, isn’t it? Forgive a selfish old woman, Matthew.”

She left, just as he’d asked, and the world was dark again.

—

It was Karen who came into his office only to find him white-knuckling the armrests of his chair. He was flushed and sweating, failing to regulate his heart.

“Jesus, Matt, are you okay?” she said, rushing to his side. “We should have gone to the hospital earlier, Foggy could have dealt with that lady—”

Matt leaned back and swiveled in his chair to give Karen the appearance of looking up at her. Facing them comforted the sighted. He caught her hands, and she gave him a squeeze. 

“What did she look like?” he asked. “What — what was she like? I couldn’t read her. I can always — but I couldn’t read her, Karen.”

“Oh. Um.” Karen shook herself and stood up straight. Matt’s hands dropped into his lap. He went cold from the loss contact, and he shivered. “I don’t know, pretty normal? White lady. Hard to pin down her age. Salt and pepper hair, long but tied back. Comfy clothes and shoes, nothing flashy. Her eyes…” The breath Karen drew was shaky. “They were so _black_. You couldn’t tell her iris from her pupil, and some people are just like that but in her they looked… out of place.”

“Was she acting strangely at all, when you found her outside?”

“She had a funny way of expressing herself, I guess,” Karen said. “I just thought she was nervous because most people coming into a lawyer’s office are nervous.”

“Thanks, Karen.” Matt swallowed and shuffled some books uselessly on his desk.

“Matt, did she do something to you?” 

“Listen, if any other clients come in, could you send ’em in Foggy’s direction? I’ve got a little reading to do, maybe I’ll even go home to do it since I’m under the weather.”

“Matt…”

“I’m fine, Karen,” Matt said. Karen’s teeth clacked shut and echoed between the walls. “Thanks for your concern. I probably just had some bad food last night or something. I’ll live.”

Karen took a deep breath, and Matt’s heart sank all over again. 

“I worry about you,” she said. “Foggy worries about you.”

“And I appreciate it—”

“You don’t have to do everything on your own, Matt. There are people who care about you. You can lean on us. It’s kind of what friendship is about.”

“Same goes for you, you know.”

The humidity in the room rose, and Karen swallowed around nothing.

“Yeah,” she said, choked. She stepped out of his office. “Well. You know where we are.”

The door clicked shut behind her.

—

Foggy found him at the boxing club a little after 2 o’clock. The only other people in there were two older guys huddled in the corner complaining that they couldn’t smoke and reminiscing about the days they definitely fought Muhammad Ali and Floyd Patterson. KO’d ’em both, of course. As far as Matt could tell, they hadn’t registered his presence at all.

“You know there’s this thing humans do,” Foggy said, very reasonably. “Where they talk to each other in times of need and receive things like compassion and understanding and maybe a hug, and in turn they bestow upon the human comforting them some sense of trust and affection. It’s this whole—” Foggy waved his hands behind Matt’s back. “—mutually beneficial situation involving reciprocal human interaction.”

Matt, panting, caught the punching bag in its swing toward him and let himself lean into it. His arms were starting to feel like jelly, but he knew no ache in his muscles was going to stop him from letting the devil out tonight. 

“She was my mother, Foggy,” he said. No use pussyfooting around the subject, he figured. He plowed through the stumble in Foggy’s heartbeat, the sharp intake of breath. “She was my mother and she was never there, not once, not when I was a whole, regular little nerd kid some mother might have actually wanted, not when I was blinded and me and my dad were both terrified, and not when I needed a parent so bad I gave a hollowed out ruin of a man a friendship bracelet. Why now, huh? She comes in to, what, get a look at me? To satisfy her own sense of guilt or whatever and _poof!_ she’s gone again? Just to fuck me up, Foggy. Just to come in and be a weirdo and fuck me up.” He hauled his fist back and slammed it into the punching bag and sent it whirling. Foggy yanked him backward by the back of his t-shirt before it could spin back into him. When he was out of the way, Foggy held on tight, chest pressed into his back, and Matt, lungs quaking, let himself sag into Foggy’s arms.

“Jesus, Matt,” Foggy said. His voice shook and traveled in waves down Matt’s spine. “That’s… I don’t even know what that is. I can’t believe someone would do that to someone else. I can’t believe — okay, you know what? Totally not about me. I’m sorry this is happening to you. I’m sorry all of it ever happened to you. Tell me what you need and I’ll make it happen, Matt, I swear to God.”

Matt shook his head and turned around to mash his face into Foggy’s neck and lock his arms around the comforting bulk of Foggy’s torso. 

“Just — just let me listen to you,” he said. Foggy pulled in a deep breath and rubbed Matt’s back while Matt pressed his ear into Foggy’s shoulder and opened his mouth against Foggy’s pulse point. 

_Foggy. Anchor. Cold air outside, constricting the capillaries in his lungs. The rush and trickle of saliva pooling under his tongue before he swallows. Lub-dub, woosh, oxygenation, too quick: adrenaline. Lub-dub is an accepted medical term. Isn’t language funny? Lub-dub is the sound of life, of vastness, of the origins of consciousness: the spark. Is it divine? Does it truly come from heaven? Or does it come from the depths of the sea, where all things slip and slide into screaming, ecstatic, horrific bloody trawling uncompromising unyielding life? Why are these forces considered mutually exclusive? Darwin didn’t believe them to be so. Lub-dub. Woosh. Fog. A rolling mist. Water from the clouds, pluming outward on the Earth in mesmerizing undulations. Foggy: heaven-sent, ocean-raised. By the two hands of God we were gifted both joy and suffering, and our life’s work is to endeavor to be worthy of such largesse. Lub-dub. Foggy: Matt’s own tide. His own ocean. His own spark. Anchor. Cold. Sweat and coffee, stale breath, laser-printed document pages. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Slow. Steady. Lub-dub._

One of Foggy’s hands had crept into Matt’s hair, and they were rocking slowly side to side. The old men were gone, and the smell of cigar smoke drifted into the room. 

“My own mother didn’t love me enough to stick around,” he said, wet and muffled into the flush of Foggy’s neck. “There must be something really, really wrong with me, Fog, if my own mother didn’t want me. How can you—”

“No, shut up,” Foggy said. “Shut up and listen. That’s her problem, not yours, do you understand me? It says a million things about who she is and not a single thing about you, okay? Say, ‘yes, Foggy, I understand I am a delight.’”

Meekly and with a tired kind of laugh, Matt nodded, but there in the sore, ill-used ventricles of his heart, he knew Foggy was wrong.

He had the devil in him.

—

“You don’t have to go out like this,” Foggy said, hours later when the sun had set, when Matt had strapped his body into the suit. “You’re in a bad state and you’re gonna do something stupid. Please, Matt.”

They’d struck a deal, after Fisk. When Matt became Daredevil, he would always tell Foggy. And, unspoken, Foggy would always be waiting for him at Matt’s apartment. Now, they’d become lovers, and Matt was breaking Foggy’s heart with each patrol. 

But Matt’s own shredded heart had nothing left inside it to spare some consideration for the only person in his life who put no conditions on his affections. The only person who really mattered. Wasn’t that proof enough of what Matt was? Matt hated himself for it, hated himself all the way out the door to the roof.

“I’ll be fine, Foggy.”

Matt heard him, even with the pounding of his feet against the rooftops, even with the wind in his ears, even with the rage and fear of the city rising up around him. He heard Foggy.

“Come back to me, Matt.”

—

Matt found trouble in the form of a crooked vice cop hassling the girls on his beat for free samples. Trouble found Matt in the form of a bullet through the vulnerable fabric at his underarm and then a solid two hundred pound man sitting on his chest and setting the barrel of a gun right up against his exposed cheekbone in an empty alley. The girl was gone, her screams fading as she ran away on uneven, broken heels.

“Looks like I caught myself a fugitive from the law,” the cop said, smirking. “Gonna get me a medal for this horn-head, dead or alive. Which you wanna try for, punk?” He tapped his gun hard on Matt’s bruised face, but it was his breath that overwhelmed all of Matt’s senses: old coffee brewed with manure and plain old dental rot. He’d need new teeth in the next five years, if Matt left him with any. Which he wouldn’t. As soon as he could catch his breath between the pain and the hot garbage stench that stoppered Matt’s ability to think, to move, to lever himself out from underneath this bag of meat unworthy of being called human. _God,_ but the stink was melting his mind — or was it the light that was spilling in from the edges of the world?

He gasped. Tears streamed unbidden from his eyes. Bright and powerful, the light seared him and he wept.

When the light receded, no weight sat upon his chest and though he was bruised and sore, he was no longer full of holes and bleeding. He struggled to sit up, to filter out the sound of his own harsh breath, but she was there again to distract him, glowing gently some feet away and, apparently, smoking a cigarette.

“What _are_ you?” he panted. 

“Can’t you guess?” A clicking tongue chastisement. “Matthew. I thought you were a good Catholic boy.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You, this — none of it makes sense.”

“Come now,” she said. “You live in a world where aliens rain down destruction and superheroes are born from chemical cocktails, and this is what you, a true believer, chooses to refute?”

“What you’re talking about is a _miracle_.”

“I knew your daddy said you were smart.”

Matt snarled and staggered to his feet.

“You can quit with the vague elliptical teasing anytime you want,” he said. “The reason you’re hanging around is for your own emotional succor, so you can stop acting like you’re doing me some kind of favor by being here and just say whatever you need to say.”

“I did do you a favor.” Smoke enveloped his face. “Kind of a big one.”

“Incidental,” Matt bit out.

“Had to call in a few favors myself,” she went on. “Healing’s not my forte.”

“You think that makes me, what, grateful?”

“I want to hear you say it,” she said. “I want to hear you _believe_.”

Matt shook his head.

“It can’t be,” he said. “It doesn’t work like that.”

A laugh like a thousand voices rumbling up from the depths. It roiled in Matt’s gut and forced him to swallow back saliva.

“It’s always so funny to me,” Katherine said. “That humans devote themselves to a single biased interpretation of the divine, translations of translations of translations, and then believe so staunchly that they not only comprehend it, but can dictate how it manifests. That’s called arrogance, Matthew. It’s called self-aggrandizement. It’s called _being a special snowflake._ ”

“You show up in my life after thirty years’ absence to insult me? I’m not impressed.”

“Hmm.” She sounded amused. Matt felt the cigarette tumble to the pavement, and he felt the way she ground its flame out of existence beneath her toe. “Spend enough time here and you become as sentimental as His favorite little pets, I’m afraid. You’re right about — what was it you called it? — my need for emotional succor. You might be my best work, Matthew, and let me tell you, I’ve done a lot of work.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do,” she said. “Use that fancy brain of yours and _say the words_.”

Matt’s breath shuddered out of him. Squeezing his eyes tight didn’t stop the glow from permeating his consciousness. Picking up the way people five blocks away laughed and fought and fucked couldn’t block that unearthly voice from his ears. The weight of exhaust and ozone on his skin didn’t negate the warmth he could feel pouring off her. He could smell her, he could taste her, there underneath the notes of the cigarette: she was like sugar on fire.

“You’re an angel,” he whispered.

“Good boy, Matthew,” she said. “Now tell me what kind.”

At the core of himself, where all his ferocity lived, where he could feel the need to right the ills of the city pervade his body like hot, pumping adrenaline, Matt suddenly knew what it was he once called the devil. 

“You’re an avenging angel.”

“Ah, so.” Katherine lit another cigarette and pulled in a lazy drag. “Here we are.”

“But you — how did you even _make_ —”

The slick spread of a smile, a thousand sparks of light. Matt’s knees buckled, but something held him upright.

“Are you asking me where babies come from, Matthew?”

“You’re a person,” Matt said. “My friends saw you.”

“And so did you, it seems. Ain’t that a kick in the eyes?” 

Matt shook his head as if clearing it of cobwebs, as if the motion could somehow make him understand. Katherine sighed, and the smoke traced a snaking line into the sky until it disappeared. 

“We’re not what you think, you know,” she said. “In the Judeo-Christian sense. But I’m afraid we’re bound by the limitations of your language and your puny human experience, so I will attempt to articulate it as best as I can with what little I’ve got to work with.”

“Gee, thanks.” 

She linked her arm with his and patted his hand. The glow of her pulsed all around him.

“We’re walking now,” she said. “You’ll appear to be wearing your customary menswear to any passersby, and they will forget they ever saw us, because there is something pressing on TV.”

“Oh.”

“You must think of me not as a being, but as a force,” Katherine said. “Beings feel; forces simply are, do you understand?”

“Not even a little bit.” 

“You are aware that there are many orders of angel, Matthew,” she said. “We are not all soft, sweet Cherubim, blonde and chubby, coddling your stubbed toe. What you call an avenging angel is an agent of good against evil in the material universe. That is our reason to be — no more and no less. We do not judge. We do not feel any particular way about our task. We smite. We destroy. We serve a divine and righteous justice alone.”

“So why the hell are you on this worthless spinning ball of sin, putting babies around and abandoning them?”

She laughed again.

“To be able to exist here these days, to do our work, we are given human bodies,” she said. “I’m five millennia old, did you know that? But every hundred years I have to trade in for a new model, and Matthew, these bodies of yours. They are frail. They are vulnerable. They _need_.”

“Oh my God, stop talking.”

“I’ll spare you the details,” she said. She pulled in a lungful of smoke. “I have one million eyes, and I cannot see His Plan. I think it would be easier if He sent us all here as birds. A hawk. An eagle. An owl, even. Something primal no man can defeat though he may shoot it, or cage it, or clip its wings. Yes. I’d like to have wings again. I’ll make my case next time.”

“Katherine.”

They stopped. They were three blocks from Matt’s apartment. Foggy was inside, pretending not to pace. Pretending to watch TV. Matt was acutely aware that all of Katherine’s attention was pinned on him, and it was as heavy as her divine task.

“It seeps in,” she said. “Sentimentality. Softness. _Humanity_. I’ve been here a long time, Matthew. I was weak, and I loved your father as best I could. I even loved you, in my way. But I could not stay. When you were born and you were more beautiful than the face of God, I knew I could not stay. I would have destroyed you, as I destroy all things I touch.”

Something inside Matt broke open. It seared him as surely as Katherine’s celestial light, but it was a good, clean pain. 

“ _God_ ,” he said, breathless. His mother was a pillar, holding him up.

“That’s one word for it,” she said. “Matthew, listen to me.”

“I am,” he said. “I’m here. I’m…what I am.”

“I’ve been… concerned, all this time, that my fool sentiment burdened you not only with your father’s emotion but my righteous compulsion, and that it was a toxic, untenable combination. But I see now. I see you, my darling boy.”

“Tell me.” Begging. Weeping. Unabashed and whole, for the first time. “Tell me what you see.”

“To merge the divine with the fallible in you — this is a _gift_.”

Matt sobbed, and maybe it was into her hands, maybe it was into her shoulder, he knew nothing of her but warmth and light. 

“We’re going to get you home,” Katherine said, “and you’ll not see me again. But listen to me, are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Know that you are the best of us,” she said. “Know that you are the best of God’s flawed creatures — the angels and the humans. The best of me, and the best of Jack Murdock. You are love itself, and you are the righteous fist of that which we call vastness, and when you stumble, when you fall, when you are wholly human in your failings — know that you are the finest gift from heaven, and you were forged in the very fires of creation to be exactly as you are.”

“Katherine—”

“Love fiercely, Matthew, with everything you have in you,” she said. “That’s what salvation is.”

With that, Matt fell to his knees in his own apartment, only to find his mother had dissipated like mist.

—

Matt came back to himself lying supine on the floor while frantic hands tore at the suit, skimming his skin for the source of so much red. The mask lay inert some feet away as Foggy stripped Matt down to the waist.

“Jesus Christ, where’s the blood coming from? Matt, answer me! Matt!”

“Foggy, I’m fine,” Matt said in a croak. He cleared his throat and tried to sit up. “Foggy, stop, I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine! You’re bleeding! You’re crying!”

“That’s just… I’m fine, stop, look at me, Foggy.” Matt caught Foggy’s hands and stilled him. He was shaking, and Matt hushed him by bringing his palms to rest on Matt’s pectorals where his pulse was the strongest. He butted his forehead against Foggy’s. “Hey. I’m fine.”

Foggy shuddered and threw himself into Matt, his arms slung too tight around Matt’s neck. Matt didn’t mind; it was a welcome, solid pressure.

“I’m sorry,” Matt said, because he should have said it a million times before now. “I’m sorry I’m such an asshole, and I’m sorry I worry you, and I’m sorry I come home to you covered in blood.”

Foggy’s laugh was shaky and wet as he pulled back to look Matt in the face. The air tightened around his eyes, the curly corners of his mouth: fond, a little exasperated, but so glad to see him. 

“I knew what I was signing up for, Murdock,” he said. 

“I could make it easier on you, though,” Matt said. “I know that.”

A roll of the heat coming off him, a rearrangement of the space he took up. Foggy had shrugged and then rolled his shoulders inward. His breath gave away his intention to speak, but Matt interrupted him.

“Don’t say it’s fine,” Matt said. “I’m gonna try to be better. I’m gonna _be_ better, okay?”

One of his favorite sounds: the quick spread of Foggy’s mouth into a grin.

“Okay, bud,” he said. “Thanks.”

Matt cupped his face and leaned in so their noses were touching. He rubbed his thumbs over Foggy’s cheekbones and savored the way his cheeks filled his palms, the way his breath hitched.

“What happened to you tonight?” Foggy said. “You’re…different.”

“How am I usually, after a patrol?”

“Depends,” Foggy said. “Sometimes you’re all beat up and broody, and I have to call Claire and rein in my urge to cuddle it away. Sometimes you just slink home and pout and I can tell you’ve come over all Catholic on me. Sometimes, your blood’s up and you get all confident and so, so sexy, and I just… Well. You were there. You know how that went.”

Matt smiled.

“You don’t really have to rein in your cuddle instincts, you know.”

“Yeah, finally adding sex to the equation clued me in to that one the other day,” Foggy said. “So you wanna move this snuggle party to the soft soft bed, or—”

“I have so much to tell you, Fog,” Matt said. He pressed a kiss into Foggy’s mouth, stole his breath right from his lungs. “But there’s something you should know first, the most important thing.”

“Huh?” Kiss-dazed and beautiful. Tiny, wet flutters: Foggy blinking at him. Matt kissed him again, pressed their foreheads together.

“I love you,” he said. “I should have said it a long time ago. I’m gonna say it every day. I love you, Foggy.”

“Oh.” The smallest gust of wind. All of Foggy’s wonder. 

Matt kissed him again, and again, and again.

—

Foggy threatened, daily, to sew wings onto the suit.

“Butterfly ones today, Matty,” he’d say. Or, “How do you feel about pterodactyls?” Or, “I could legit make these dragon ones match the Daredevil aesthetic though, don’t you think?”

Matt would shake his head, maybe stick his tongue out. And Foggy would look at him in that way he had: with his whole heart. The words wouldn’t be necessary, wouldn’t be anything either of them didn’t already know, but they’d say them anyway. Just to be sure.

**End**


End file.
